The Edinburgh Dead

The Annan Road

There was rioting in Dumfries when Quire staggered out, aching and stiff and weary, from the black coach that had brought him south. It had done so at remarkable speed. Remarkable, and punishing for any passengers, of which Quire had been the only one. His conveyance was the well-appointed funereal coach of the Widow, Mary Coulter, and it was as comfortable as any of its kind might be, but the road was rough and long, and no coach could make that a pleasant experience. He did not feel himself ready to confront the raw vigour of a mob run wild, but that was what he found.

Dumfries was not a large town, nor one with a reputation for much in the way of trouble. Despite that, Quire guessed there were well in excess of five thousand people besieging the jailhouse when he stepped down on to the main street. They were waving sticks and flinging stones at the windows and the gaslights. As Quire watched, a stone went through the hood of one of the lights, and it shattered and went out with a snap. Half the windows of the courthouse and its jail were already put in.

Quire pulled the big, heavy bundle off the seat of the coach. It was wrapped in many layers of sacking, and was cumbersome enough to test even Quire’s considerable strength.

“You’d best wait for me back at that coach inn,” Quire said to the driver who had brought him south in such haste.

Fleck, the Widow had told Quire his name was, and the very sole of discretion. So much so that he had hardly uttered a word to Quire in all the journey, and his expression never varied from one of sour repose. But he knew his way about a coach and horse, Quire had to concede that.

Fleck now turned the black coach about in the road and went trundling off. Quire gave his attention to the great mass of irate townsfolk that blocked off a long stretch of the high street. It was as febrile a mob as he had seen in a long time, and a big one for a town the size of Dumfries. Whatever had brought so many furious folk here, it had brought them from far afield.

A hundred or more local militiamen were arrayed across the front of the judicial building, armed with canes and staves and batons. They watched the surging crowd with uneasy, tense expressions, many of them turning their weapons in their hands, or tapping them upon the ground. Quire had an idea of how these things worked. If men were sent out with guns, as often as not they were for show, meant to cow the mob into order; if men were sent out with batons, as often as not they were meant to be used, and they usually were. The chaotic scene before him had the clear feel, in his estimation, of impending violence.

He needed to find out what was happening before that storm broke. Shouldering his ungainly bundle, balancing it there with one arm, he managed to separate a man, more composed than most of his fellows, from the fringes of the throng. He was composed, true enough, but he had paving cobbles in his hands that he had torn up from the street. Quire ignored that, and played the ignorant visitor.

“What’s the cause of all this?”

“They’ve got Hare in there,” the man said, a little breathless, a little ruddy-cheeked. It was an invigorating business, riot. “The Edinburgh murderer,” he continued. “The one who killed all they folk and got away with it.”

“You sure it’s him?” Quire asked, looking towards the jailhouse.

Those militiamen were pushing back against the encroaching, bellowing mob. They laid about them with their sticks, and there were yelps of pain mixed in with the shapeless rumble of anger the crowd gave out.

“Aye, sure.” The man was watching events at the front of the crowd as closely as Quire, as if anxious not to miss out on anything. “He was recognised on the mail coach. One of the other passengers knew him, from the trial. A lawyer. There’s some ill luck for the evil bastard, eh? Getting put on a coach with a man who chanced to know his face.”

“Nobody ever did deserve more in the way of ill luck.”

He was not sure what he himself had done to deserve such good luck, either, but he would gladly take it.

“Right,” the Dumfries man said. “That’s right. So the coach arrives, word gets about, and folk start thinking maybe we should hang the bastard ourselves, since the Crown didn’t see fit to do it. We almost got him, at the King’s Arms, but the police snuck him out a back window. Now he’s in there.”

As he spoke, the line of militiamen suddenly plunged into the front edge of the crowd, their batons rising and falling with an entirely more vicious and emphatic speed than they had previously done. Panic sped through the mob like a thought in a mind, communicating itself to the furthest reaches in mere moments. People began to run. Others began to turn their missiles upon the militiamen, rather than the buildings behind them.

Quire moved smartly away, already knowing the outcome. He kept himself well out of sight, down a narrow lane, as the great crowd was first beaten back, then muted, then routed and dispersed. He watched them fleeing into the night, scattering in all directions, their righteous fury abruptly forgotten in their haste to get out of the reach of the militiamen.

By the time midnight was past, Dumfries high street was deserted. It was littered with stones and broken glass and abandoned clubs. The militiamen were gone, their brutal duty discharged with rare efficiency. The rioters were gone, to nurse their bruises and their sore heads, and no doubt spin happy tales of the day’s excitement. Only Quire remained, sitting at the foot of a wall, just a little way down that lane, far enough from the light of the street lamps to keep himself safely hidden in shadow. He could see the jailhouse from there, and waited with the most profound, perfect patience for it to reveal its secrets to him.

He had not killed Jack Rutherford. The temptation had been there, certainly, but Quire had no wish to become any more of an executioner and a widow-maker than he already was. Than he needed to be. So he settled for knocking out a few teeth, and putting a mortal fear into the man.

He had not slept since then. There had been too much to do. He had gone to Major Weir’s house. Alone, almost overcome by fear, but finding there only the dead. Lying close by one another in a derelict room: Isabel Ruthven and what remained of Blegg. Quire had covered his mouth against the stench of rot and charred flesh that wafted from Blegg’s horribly disfigured corpse. The rats were already at work upon the flesh. They scattered from the body as Quire brought unwanted light into their dismal domain, flowing like brown shadows across the ground and vanishing into their tunnels.

He had formed himself a plan quickly after that, but it had taken much of the night to turn it from thought into deed. He had traded his French pistol to a disreputable dealer in curios and oddities who kept a dingy little shop on St. Mary’s Wynd. The man had been furious to be roused from his sleep for no better reason than a trade, but he was somewhat mollified when he saw what Quire proposed: a fine French flintlock, complete with case, in exchange for an old Brown Bess and a score of prepared cartridges. It was a transaction so imbalanced in the dealer’s favour that he could hardly demur. Quire regretted the loss of that pistol, but there was nothing to be done about it. For hunting, a man needed a long gun.

Thence, Quire went to find the Widow, and he made himself her debtor. He needed ten pounds from her to pay for Maclellan’s message from the prison. He needed a carriage to carry him along the road taken by the southern mail. Mary Coulter had smiled, and Quire had foreseen in that smile all manner of difficulties and regrets in his future, but she asked nothing of him now, and gladly gave him money and the loan of her own black coach.

Last, a kiss to Cath’s sleeping forehead—she stirring at the touch of his lips but not waking, which was as he wished it—and he was away.

So he found himself sitting in an alleyway in Dumfries, in the bitter cold early hours of the morning, when the police brought William Hare out from the jailhouse. They did it cautiously, surreptitiously. They had a jacket hung over his head, but that made no odds to Quire. He would not have recognised the face in any case. The anonymous figure the police escorted down the steps of the jailhouse to the waiting carriage wore black gloves, though, and that was enough to make Quire sure he had the right of it.

He waited until he saw which road the carriage was taking out of town, and then ran for the King’s Arms. It was a big, ramshackle coaching inn of the old-fashioned sort, built around a wide yard, with stables and plenty of bedrooms and even a little smithy and wheelwright’s workshop. All quiet now. All still.

Fleck was dozing, stretched out on the seat inside the coach, with his legs crossed and his tall black hat settled over his face like an upturned pot. Quire shook his boot to rouse him, and the man sprang instantly, almost unnaturally, to full wakefulness.

“They’ve gone out on the Annan road,” Quire said.

Fleck made no complaint at being woken at such an ungodly hour. He had spent the whole day, and much of the night, sitting high up there as the coach bounded along. Quire was coming to a certain admiration for the man’s dour resilience. He rode up there with him now, not wanting to be shut away in the body of the coach where he would see, or hear, nothing.

They followed the little police carriage out along the road running south-east towards Annan village. That was close by the border with England, and to ports where a man might find a boat to take him to Ireland. Hare—whatever he now was, whatever now resided behind his eyes—might be intent upon either of those paths.

They followed not by sight, for the darkness was still deep, barely touched, out on the far eastern horizon, by the first premonition of dawn. Instead they kept their distance, and paused now and again to listen for the rattle of the other carriage over ruts. If they heard nothing, they pressed on a little faster, but never so close as to risk being seen. There were in any case no turnings from this road down which a carriage was likely to go until well past Annan, as best Quire could think.

The sky slowly lightened, inching its way towards what looked likely to be a bright and cloudless daybreak. That would be some time yet, though. The moors that flanked the road were only grudgingly released from the concealing darkness. They made a great, wild land through which to ride. Not a tree in sight, for as far as Quire could see in the gradually retreating gloom. Just mile after mile of heather moorland, rising in a series of long, low waves, each crest growing fainter and losing its brown and green patterning in stages to a flat grey.

He had grown up amidst land like this, and found it familiar and comfortable then, but he had been gone from it long enough that it seemed to him to have something of the wilderness about it now. He had travelled a long distance from the boy he had been then. He did not know, as he swayed across the moors atop the Widow’s coach, whether the journey had been well done, or quite what its conclusion would be.

They crested a low rise in the road, and Fleck hauled unceremoniously at the reins, bringing the weary black horse to an abrupt halt. Quire shook his head and rubbed at his eye. He had been drifting, half-lost in a dull stupor of exhaustion. That cleared quickly enough when he saw that the police carriage was stopped, perhaps a quarter-mile ahead. There was not a cottage or a farm or a track to be seen in any direction, just the featureless heath. Quire jumped down on to the road. It hurt his stiff and tired legs.

“If you keep back out of sight, I’ll just wait here a bit and see what happens,” he said to Fleck who, as ever, silently did as he was told.

Quire was concerned that the big black coach would not get behind the skyline quickly enough, and would be seen, but there was no sign of life at all from the carriage up ahead. He laid himself down in the heather at the side of the road, and watched.

It did not take long. A single figure stepped out of the little carriage, and walked away from it, straight out into the heather, without a backward glance. The carriage slowly, inelegantly, turned about in the road and began to come back up towards Quire. He was not interested in it any more, though. He had eyes only for that lone figure, loping away from the road into the wilderness.

Quire ran back to the Widow’s coach, and threw open its door. Fleck watched him with mild curiosity; the most expansive emotion Quire had seen him display thus far.

“You’d best get back to Dumfries, I’d say,” Quire called to him as he worked. “Wait there for me till noon tomorrow. Or the morning after if you’re feeling generous. If you don’t see me by then, get yourself back to Edinburgh.”

He unrolled the sacking bundle. It had been thickly wrapped, the better to conceal its contents. He took the musket out first, and slung it over his shoulder. Then pouches of cartridges that he set upon his belt, and the French sabre that he threaded on there too. Last a backpack, heavy, that he hung on his other shoulder.

“Police are coming,” Fleck observed, startling Quire with his sudden loquacity.

He looked up, and saw and heard the police carriage make its shaking approach along the track towards them. Quire darted around to the far side of the coach, hiding himself from their view. He watched Fleck doff his hat and call a greeting as they trundled past, but neither of the two police officers in the carriage responded. They looked, from the glimpse of their faces Quire caught through the windows of the coach, thoroughly dejected. As would he be, he supposed, if his official duties involved saving men such as Hare from the justified wrath of the common folk, and escorting them safely on their way.

Once the police carriage was out of sight, Quire went to the front of the coach and reached up to offer Fleck his hand. The coachman regarded it blankly for a moment or two, then took it in his own and gently shook it.

“I’m grateful for your help,” Quire said in the dawn’s gathering light.

Fleck just nodded.

“I’ll hope to see you in a day or two,” Quire said.

And with that they parted, Fleck to Dumfries, Quire to the moors. Before he went, he loaded the musket. The movements were more familiar now than they had been for years. He had made Fleck stop, on a wild stretch of road somewhere a couple of hours south of Edinburgh, and spared a few precious minutes from the pursuit to get a feel for the gun and his handling of it. Standing there, on the edge of bleak, empty fields, he loaded, and fired, four or five times over, the shots booming out over the barren land. Each time he had been a little faster, a little surer. As he would have to be, he suspected.

He ran out into the heather. He did not try for too much pace. He was tired enough already, and had no wish to bring himself to his knees any sooner than he had to. And he remembered, from his youth, just how treacherous these places could be to a man who attempted to cover too much ground too quickly, hiding all manner of pits and hollows and tripping roots beneath the endless, featureless carpet of heather.

Hare was out of sight, swallowed up by the vast landscape, but Quire did not concern himself with that. He had marked the man’s course, and angled his own to meet it, out there in the trackless waste. If he could not see his quarry for now, it would only be some hollow in the land, or the tiny dip of a valley cut by a little burn, that was hiding it from him.

Grouse burst from his feet and went churring away low over the heather, like winged balls shot from the mouth of a cannon. The first time it happened he almost fell, so alarming and unexpected was the noise and blur of movement; after that, he was not so easily startled. Watchful, though. Always watchful.

There came a time when he slowed, first to a trot, and then a walk. And, at last, to a halt. He stood, knee-deep in the brittle heather, and looked out across the undulating ground before him. Slowly, he unshipped the Brown Bess from his shoulder and pulled back the hammer until it locked into place. He fixed his gaze upon one patch of heath, a hundred yards or more away. There was a hue mixed in there, a patch of it, that did not quite belong. Quire stared at it, and waited.

Hare rose to his feet. Quire could see the feral glee in the man’s smile, even at that distance.

“You’re a plague, Quire,” Hare shouted out across the heather. “A revenant, sent to haunt me again and again, is that it? Do you not know I’m under the King’s protection?”

It was the first time Quire had heard the voice of his enemy. While it resided in Blegg, it had never once spoken to him. It did so now in a soft Irish brogue. Whether mimicry or memory or pure invention, Quire did not know. It did not matter. He did not mean to listen to much of what the thing might have to say.

Hare began to run towards him. Quire dipped his left shoulder to let the backpack slip from it. The pack’s fall was cushioned by the mat of springy heather. He dropped on to his right knee, and breathed slowly in and out. He rested his left elbow on his left leg and set the musket’s butt to his shoulder. He looked out along the line of the barrel, across the moor, to the figure running towards him.

He willed his weaker left arm to hold steady, willed his heart to slow, his eyes to clear. The fear was in him, but he pushed it away, far enough that it did not cloud him.

He could hear the heather thrashing against Hare’s legs. Could see the wild hatred in the man’s eyes. A tremor went through him, but he tensed himself to still it, and then let his muscles go slack once more. Closer and closer he let Hare come, knowing that if his first shot missed, he might not live long enough for a second. He had been a fine shot once, and needed to be again. Closer, until he could see little glints of the risen sun on the buttons of Hare’s waistcoat, until he could bear it no more.

He held his breath, and squeezed the trigger, and the Bess roared in his hands. He shot Hare in the knee. It spun the man about and sent him crashing down into the heather, tall and straggly enough there to swallow him up completely.

Quire did not wait for him to rise, as he knew he would. He leaped to his feet, and began the ritual of reloading. His fingers shook, just slightly, as he fumbled the next cartridge out of his belt pouch. He heard movement, out there in the heather. He bit out the top of the paper packet, tapped just enough of the grey, grainy powder into the pan to prime it. He heard Hare rising. Held the gun erect, tipped powder down the barrel.

“Quire, you bastard,” he heard Hare cry at him.

Turned the cartridge about in his fingers, still less steady than he would have liked. Hare was running at him. He saw the dark shape, coming unsteadily now, hampered by his ruined knee. Got the ball into the gun’s mouth, pulled the ramrod up and out from its home. Punched it down Bess’ gullet. He looked up. Twenty yards, no more. Hare’s lips were pulled back in a snarl. Quire kept hold of the ramrod, shouldered the musket, shot Hare in the other leg.

They were so close that the smoke plumed out over Hare, and he fell forwards through it.

“You’re a hard man to kill, someone told me a while ago,” Quire said as he stepped back, out of reach of the hands clawing for him, “so I’ve given it a bit of thought, on the road down here.”

Hare was not done yet, though. Quire had misjudged the ferocious will and power of what was inside the man. Hare surged up once more, and part-staggered, part-rushed forward, throwing himself at Quire, who sprang away. Quire’s heel caught on a gnarled heather stem, and he fell back. He tried to roll at once, but the dense heather hampered him, and in less than a heartbeat’s span, there were hands like stone wrapped around his left ankle, pulling at him. The scabbard of the sabre caught about a half-buried stone as Hare dragged him nearer, and he used that to lever himself up so that he could hammer with the butt of the musket at the arms that held him.

He hit his own leg as much as any limb of Hare’s, and the pain was excruciating, but the hands did come away from his ankle, once a few of the fingers were battered and broken. Quire scrambled away, and got rather gingerly to his feet. He put more ground between him and Hare as the latter rose again, swaying and rocking on legs too crippled to do much more than hold him there. He managed to move them, even so, and though he fell, and had to struggle back on to his feet, he came stubbornly on at Quire.

Who reloaded the Brown Bess again. He was strangely at peace, now that there was nothing to do, nothing to think about, save the immediate and obvious necessity. That calmness lent a speed to his hands. The musket was ready to fire again in no more than twenty seconds, and he brought it smoothly up and had the luxury of another second or two to measure his breathing and take good aim. That second shot had missed the knee at which it was aimed by some little way. The third did not, blasting out the joint in an eruption of shredded cloth and meat and bone splinters. Hare fell, and this time Quire did not think he would be rising soon.

“What are you?” Quire asked as he began to work his way through the movements needed to make the musket ready once more. It was mechanical now; the instinctive memory of it reawakened in him by repetition. He barely needed to watch what he was doing, and could keep his eyes upon Hare.

Hare was still trying to get to his feet, but his legs buckled beneath him and he went down. He lifted himself up on his hands and leered at Quire.

“What does that matter?” the beast laughed. “I’m here. I’ll always be here.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Quire grunted. “Future’s full of surprises, I’ve found. Best not to concern yourself overmuch with it. Concentrate on the present.”

He looked at his right hand. There was a fine layer of gunpowder dusted across it now. He wiped it clean on his trousers.

“Are you not the Devil, then?” he asked.

Hare laughed.

“No, Mr. Quire, I’m not your Devil. But think of me that way, if it makes you happy. I’ll not mind. Just stop with all your questions. You’d as well ask what the wind is, or the water, or the earth, as what I am.”

“They’ll have answers to all that, likely as not, the way the scientists and the philosophers and such are getting so busy these days,” Quire said as he raised the musket to his shoulder.

“Never to me,” Hare shouted, “never to me.”

To Quire’s amazement, he hauled himself to his feet yet again, bone crackling in his knees as he did so, his legs twisting and bending unnaturally. He took a long, sinking pace towards Quire, his face contorted into a mask of such pure hatred that it rendered it almost inhuman. More beast than man.

“Never to you,” Quire muttered, “Aye, you might be right about that.”

And he shot Hare for the fourth and last time, in the heart, and knocked him down with the force of it.

Quire set the Brown Bess aside then, leaving it safely out of reach of the still writhing figure in the heather. He drew his sabre as a flock of ravens went croaking overhead, rolling about. He glanced up at them, and saw for the first time that the sky was blue now; a pristine field of azure, from horizon to horizon.

He looked at Hare. He was lying face down. The violence of his movements was diminishing. Quire trod on one of the man’s outstretched arms and pinned it down. He hacked at the wrist with the sabre. It took a few blows to separate hand from arm, and it came away without much in the way of blood or gore. The spirit inhabiting Hare did not seem to notice.

Quire peeled the glove off the hand, and looked impassively at the crude writing and symbols scrawled across the skin. None of it he could understand; there was no meaning to it for him. But Durand had said to clear the writing from the hand, and Quire thought that taking the hand from the body should serve just as well.

He cut the other hand away more easily. He rolled Hare on to his back. There was no movement in the limbs now, but the eyes still darted from side to side. They found Quire’s face, and held on to his gaze. The lips trembled, trying to recall the shape of a sneer.

Quire trotted over to his backpack and tipped it out. He gathered up the flasks of lamp oil and carried them to Hare’s corpse. He poured most of the oil over the body, and then set about the business of gathering as much dry, old heather as he could, slashing at it with the sword. It would dull the blade, but he hoped to have no further use for the thing. He heaped the loose, leggy clumps of heather over Hare’s prostrate form.

He meant, as well, to have no further use for the cartridges in his belt pouches, so he tore them all open and made a little mound of the powder close by the pyre. He soaked some more heather in the last of the oil, and laid that over the pyramid of gunpowder. And then, at last, he knelt, and held the musket low down, and sent sparks from the flintlock scattering out into the powder and the oil-soaked heather.

He sat on a low rock, perhaps thirty yards away, and watched Hare burn. Great yellow flames licked up into the sky, and thick, stinking black smoke that made coils of itself as it rose.

Quire felt a good deal more calm and content than he had expected to. There was, he realised as the flames consumed the corpse, a remarkable lightness about his life now. It contained almost nothing, had almost no weight to it. Blegg, and Ruthven, and everything that went with them were gone; so was his place on the city police. No wage, none of that purpose that his work had put into his life. Nothing left to him of it. All burned away, just as Hare was now, out on the moors.

There was Cath, though. He thought of her as he sat, looking out over the vast silver expanse of the Solway Firth that the bright day had discovered, far to the south, and freed from the shackles of darkness. The sun sent a thousand rippling, glittering shards of light racing over the surface of the sea.

Quire reached down and plucked a sprig of heather from beside his hard seat. He would take that back to Cath, he thought. For luck.